EMC EHC Federation SDDC : PaaS with Pivotal CF.

I recently had a discussion with a couple of my colleagues while working on a PaaS / IaaS EHC project recently. We were trying to come up with test cases for testing PaaS capability for Applications. So while discussing that I figured I would blog about the testing process and the kind of model that a company needs to adhere to while testing. Do you test all aspects of the solution including the infrastructure and middle ware layer? or do you test just the application layer? The answer is that it depends on the platform you are going to use. Are you are using a publicly available PaaS platform like AppEngine, Azure, AWS Beanstalk, or whether you want to have to have the development capability hosted internally in a private / hybrid cloud. The testing process for both of them different quite significantly. Or Does it? Bear with me..

PaaS has a major benefit for production deployment. Even with dev,test,stage and pre-prod, the smallest of changes can have a major impact and tend to cause big outages, if not tested completely. So to ensure that the PaaS platform is robust, we need to ensure that all the infrastructure and processes in the Hybrid Cloud environment are able to ensure that robustness.

Any PaaS platform needs to demonstrate the following capabilities

Operational Visibility and Control

Security

Services

Automation

Portability

Now everyone has seen the different ‘XaaS’ cloud model, so I am not going to repeat that. I mean well.. here it is

Now lets look at who provides the capability for each of the characteristics mentioned above the XaaS picture

Operational Visibility and Control – VMware + Pivotal CF

Security – RSA + VMware + Pivotal CF

Services – VCE + EMC + VMware

Automation – VMware + Pivotal CF

Portability – VMware + Pivotal CF

So when the client wants to test the PaaS applications, doesn’t that mean that all other aspects of the platform have to be tested as well ? Absolutely.

So when you are testing a platform for Hybrid Cloud PaaS, you not only need to ensure that the application is able to scale out as and when required, your infrastructure services and the middleware services are able to support that scale out model. This is where EHC has its strength, with pre-tested stack of software and hardware entities,we ensure that when a client deploys EHC Platform for PaaS, the only testing they need to worry about testing the application they’re deploying.

With EHC, we test all the components that make up the bulk of the IaaS and PaaS layer. Being part of the same federation with companies like VMware, RSA, Pivotal and VCE, there are a lot of smart people who develop and ensure that the components of the solution work well together.

Pivotal CF Elastic Runtime, for example, delivers a dynamic & highly available platform to enable application owners to easily push, scale, and maintain applications over their lifecycle. The picture below shows the main components of the Pivotal CF Elastic Runtime Environment.

There is so much to learn with the new product offerings that we have with EHC especially in the PaaS and Big Data Implementations. This blog is just an initiative for me to keep learning and improve my knowledge beyond ‘infrastructure’.